School league tables - do you want them?

As a parent of school-aged children, I would love to be able to have accurate and fair information regarding the local private and public schools in our area. All too often, private schools manipulate statistics to try and prove to parents that their school performs better than the public school next door. They show parents graphs comparing their private school to EVERY public school across the state. Socio-economic factors should come into play here. eg. obviously a private school in a very affluent suburb of Sydney is going to have better resources, no shortage of staff wanting to work there and children from parents who probably hold honours degrees. The same private school then 'talks up' it's standing as a 'top school' by showing how much 'better' it performs than the state's public schools - ofcourse failing to mention how many of the state's public schools are situated in very low socio-economic areas where it is very difficult for these students to have access to the same resources as their wealthy Sydney counterparts.

Good luck on getting private schools to reveal their data! I can't see that happening. The teachers' union and others are fighting to keep the public school information secret, so sadly we're a long way from having access to this information.

This would be great information to have, for example we are trying to consider areas in Sydney to consider buying and we don’t have kids yet but this has to play an important part in deciding where to look. We have been looking at the HSC results this year, and really want to send your kids to selective high schools - but that’s not always possible.

But to have a ranking system for the schools would be great, but it should include academic results, sporting results, Uni conversions, maybe even employment conversions, social achievements, how much the kids like the teachers, how much the parents like the teachers (but I think there is somewhere you can check that)

In regards to the private schools, they will always spin things to their advantage they are there to make a profit so marketing is important to them, so unless a third party with no interest comes around, never going to happen. Plus my personal opinion (being someone from both private and public schools) none of them are worth the money, they can be better than public but not 20k a year better.